..out of the dark

http://www.hillmanfoundation.org/blog/washington-post-rip

which reported that Post publisher Katharine Weymouth has decided to solicit payoffs of between $25,000 and $250,000 from Washington lobbyists, in return for one or more private dinners in her home, where lucky diners will receive a chance for “your organization’s CEO” to interact with “Health-care reporting and editorial staff members of The Washington Post” and “key Obama administration and congressional leaders …”

I.e., it used to be (in a fictional past) that the paper would write stories to impress and inform the public. Who then bought it, because they wanted to get informed. And now the paper finances itself by making sure the stories it writes down are favourable to the lobbyists - who pay to have input on editorial staff considerations. And the paper does this because either the population is stupid and doesn't want to be informed any longer. Or because they earn more money not actually dealing in news, but in propaganda.

I think they had an op- ed by John Bolton again, praising the glory of democracy, free markets and fascism a couple of days ago.

Run- down at Greenwald's blog:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/06/19/washpost/index.html

Anyone who has read this blog for a while will know why I'm frequently quoting and linking Froomkin, either on his so called "opinion" column on the online part of Washington Post, or at niemanwatchdog.org. He offers an incredibly constant stream of insightful and knowledgeable context to issues on the agenda at the White House. As well as on related issues of the day. More than that, through the Bush- years for me, and before that for others, he kept many of us interested in facts and analysis rather than simply spin, and so helped us - I won't mince words here - retain our sanity when confronted with how the political situation in the US was degenerating into a very ugly mess. Where controlling information and establishing initial and unquestioned parameters was and is central to maintaining narratives about affairs of state. Rather than analysis and discussion.

Not simply because he relentlessly questioned the Bush- administration's insanities, in other words, but because he did so without the very easily adopted antagonism and equally wrong internal counter- logic that most administration critics typically have - regardless of the issue in question. He was often frank about this - the idea was to reveal and discuss the methods and attempts by politicians to establish facts, conventions and words as having certain meaning. And so he questioned them, and revealing without antagonism the substance of the positions.

The criticism naturally has been mounting steadily. No wonder - he made everyone else in the Washington establishment, journalists and politicians, look stupid. Remembering and illuminating how the narratives would change from week to week, rather than simply reiterating them - as is the typical mode of journalism and commentary in the US - inevitably did so.

In fact, the criticism was very revealing. As repeated incidents would show - no one was ever capable of challenging Froomkin's objectivity or content. Instead, the substance of the critique would be that Froomkin at all challenged the establishment narratives in the first place. If it did not become a liability for "real" beat reporters, it was frequently alleged that Froomkin undermined Washington Post's credibility. Allegations like these would not from politicians, however, but from other journalists and the editors at the Washington Post.

The reason for this is obvious, and described at length by me and others - critics and supporters - before. The way journalism is run in the US is through a very high dependency on access. You earn access by printing what your sources want, pure and simple. When you no longer repeat what they say, you become uninteresting for the White House PR efforts.

Something Froomkin, in his admirably measured way, would point out made a certain distance from the White House helpful in covering the issues in a meaningful manner. Described carefully with the fact that reporting from the White House insiders contained information fully available from simply listening to the White House speeches.

It will be interesting to see how this develops. The political situation in the US is still dire. Establishment policies are formed in an opaque a manner as ever, while Obama's insistence on openness certainly will not carry over into real measures taken by his administration. Even if Obama and his closesest advisers would wish it, and his electorate will demand it. Simply because the lack of substantive debate about any issue is so obvious - and indeed as pointed out, central to the continuation of the standing policies. Whatever names they would be advanced under.

Substantively, firing Froomkin means there is no longer any real journalism being done by any main- stream media outlet in the whole of the United States. At the same time, very few avenues exist for people who wish to discuss issues rather than method for advancing your already found point of view. And so political dialogue and legitimity suffers, while naturally criticism in itself successfully becomes associated with radical policies, or even simply policies opposed to the Administration's pronounced agenda.

I will wish Dan all the best in the future, though. Whatever he decides to do, I believe he will continue to be an invaluable source for intelligent commentary. And realistically, a different and freer context for such commentary will maybe make it even better, and more incisive and to the point, than what could safely be done at the Washington Post.

Thursday, Arlen Specter announced he would switch parties, and join the Democrats. Impacts? Possibly a filibuster- proof majority in the Senate. Others - no obvious ones. And, since any other senator not intent on sending half of the states into bankruptcy will agree that the stimulus package needs to happen, even if they disagree with how ideologically pure something it is, it.. sure makes sense to switch if you're at odds with your party... But this was the same way everyone else voted when Bush was in office - they crafted excuses to vote and do the opposite of what they "philosophically" were committed to. It was just necessary to keep the economy going, etc. So then what's the point? Shouldn't Specter just go riding the GOP line for votes, and keep voting the same way?

I've written before about Specter's problems in the Judiciary committee - his argument that he was unable to push for certain things in committee, since the republicans were not backing him - that was probably honest enough. We of course wanted to see Specter respond to the crisis by standing on principle and push along with some of the democrats (who happened to find their arse with both hands for once).

But the practical point then as now is that if he wanted to do this, he would be pushed out of the party. That was made perfectly clear, and was his real argument then as well. He could not simply spite his constituency, or what the GOP relied on for a constituency, because then he would not be reelected. He was, and they knew, that he was dependent on appearing like an old GOP stalwart to woo the GOP votes needed. And at that time, this meant supporting Bush in hushing everything up, and doing the right thing for protecting the country, and so on. So in a strong democratic state, it makes sense for Specter to switch parties, and try his platform with the democrats.

So is Specter just riding the polls? Or is he finally getting fed up with philosophically committed to one thing for votes, and deliberately doing another? Sure could seem there's a bit more to it than polls with the torture issue, or the legal justifications he's been hated pretty harshly for actually attempting to fish out of the Justice department about the torture practices, and so on.

And now he can do the same thing as before, and perhaps even succeed because of the majority - as well as gain support from the voters who lean towards the democratic party. Instead of losing votes with the GOP.

Obviously, it's not getting much real commentary in the US. Most of it seems like descriptions of something unexpected that people don't know what means - or it's completely predictable, because Specter is always going for the popular vote, etc.

It made someone wonder about whether the GOP is in a "philosophical" crisis over at the Wall Street Journal, though. And the answer is: apparently not.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124113372096875105.html

That's not to say the GOP doesn't need to work this through, and soon. But to do it productively, as one wise Republican put it to me, the GOP needs to be "clear about the difference between philosophy and message."

*shakes head*

If we look at this practically, and accept that these people are insane, the situation looks like this: when Lieberman switched caucuses and eventually went independent - it of course had nothing to do with his actual policies, but with appearance. He couldn't be on the team of the democrats if he wanted to vote with the GOP in practice. But he needed the appearance of being a moderate, and it was popular with the GOP and the local voters to appear being a moderate that joined with the GOP. And that's basically the reasoning behind the switch.

They're not so good at actually describing the mechanism their party works on, though, because they lack the clarity mentioned above. Because when Specter leaves the party and does the same thing as before - it's of course an indication of how far right the message and philosophy of the GOP has actually become.

I.e. - not only do you have to say crazy shit to be in the GOP - you need to be philosophically committed to it as well. And the only way to rescue the party, as the Op-ed suggests above, is to be "clear" about what to do, and how that's different from what's being said.

http://whiskeyfire.typepad.com/whiskey_fire/2009/04/why-is-the-mine-still-open-when-the-canaries-keep-expiring.html

As most of you know by now our sordid little burgh of Binghamton, New York has become the center of attention worldwide due to another gun massacre of innocent uninvolved people. These events always cause folks to wring their hands, scratch their heads and say how could this happen. What is motivating the people who do this?

I am not suprised. In fact, I am suprised that this is not happening more frequently. The violence that happened on Friday is horrible and obviously our condolences go out to the families. These violent events that grab and focus our attention momentarily are to me the obvious result of the systemic long-term violence that we no longer notice.

Appropriate. Go read.

http://www.vg247.com/2009/03/23/gdc-drm-is-a-waste-of-time-says-2dboy/

“You just end up giving the DRM provider money. Anything that is of interest gets cracked, and the cracked version ends up having a better user experience than the legit version because you don’t have to input in some 32-character serial number.

That's right. When Ubisoft released Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, they did so rushing the game past development, pushed it onto cheap discs, and ensured with the then entirely fresh Safedisc 4 that no one could play it legally on anything but a fresh win- install. I am not exaggerating - any dvd or cd drivers, burner programs or roxio plugins (installed through legally bought programs) would make the game mysteriously hang. Or worse, play with degraded performance while Windows struggled with the device- driver requests failing. On my computer, that meant I had two choices - one, install a crack, three minutes. Or two: spend quite a while uninstalling all my disc and disk- authoring tools, extra hard- drives, as well as disabling the dvd- drive on the primary IDE channel - and then cleaning up the registry. After that, I would have to run the program and install as root/admin, in order for the mysterious device- driver to complete it's calls during play.

If that wasn't bad enough, the disc- quality meant that any sector- failure would only be re- read so many times before the device- driver would fail, ending up with terminating the program during any point in the game - a feature included in Safedisc 4, to protect against pirates.

In addition, as Carmel says, it costs money for the developer, and makes sure that legitimate customers get the game perhaps only a week later than the pirated version. So here's a pro- tip for game- developers: choose convenient publishing methods scaled for your project - and choose predictably timed and quality produced launches, and the buyers will come. If not, you force people who want to play the game to install cracks. In order to get the game working out of the box, as we say.

Honestly, while I was a dedicated enough gamer to buy the game anyway, most would simply return the disc, or pirate it. And why wouldn't you, when it not only doesn't cost you money, but also is better than the product you can buy on a disc?

We could see the same with the release of NeverWinter Nights 2 - extremely dedicated gamers easily forked out money for the box. But many if not most of them still played the cracked release on the first official patch (the origin of that release should remain a mystery, of course) for as long as they played the game.

That's the reality of the pirate- scene: dedicated gamers who buy a faulty product to support the developers of a game they enjoy. And whose money is then shared between the developer, and a publisher trying to put itself out of business.

It's a thought that with the PC market, this was almost successful. Meanwhile, the console currently selling the most games (xbox, xbox360) is the most eminently hackable device yet, and with the absolutely largest collection of pirated games available.

Yes - it's almost as if DRM just doesn't pay off, isn't it, and that it actually hurts sales when it inconveniences the buyer.